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Indiana Player Knows How to Wow a Crowd

Victor Oladipo with his teammates after the Hoosiers clinched their first outright Big Ten title since 1993.Credit
Gregory Shamus/Getty Images

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. — Victor Oladipo believes there is a song for every occasion, and to the resignation of his Indiana teammates, those occasions include blinking, breathing and walking.

“Nonstop,” Cody Zeller said.

“Twenty-four seven,” Christian Watford said.

“All. The. Time,” Will Sheehey said.

In the shower, Oladipo turns into Usher. Strolling across campus, he belts out Tyrese. After acing an exam, he croons gospel because, after all, he said, he must thank God. Somehow, between serenades, Oladipo carves some time out of his day, every day, to engage in a more strenuous outlet for entertaining the masses.

The basketball court doubles as his stage, a hardwood showcase for showmanship. When the ball is in his hands — and really, often even when it is not — the audience better not look away. If it does, it could miss one of those moments of pure rapture — a vicious block, a ridiculous dunk, an even more ridiculous almost-dunk, like his behind-the-head snag of an errant alley-oop Feb. 2 against Michigan that merits at least a few dozen viewings on YouTube. All elicit a reaction commonplace at Assembly Hall — a deafening round of oh-la-DEE-po! chants, preceded by a what-just-happened facial expression: mouth agape, eyes bulging, hands firmly on head.

This season has strained the boundaries of credulity for Oladipo, a 6-foot-5 junior who has blossomed from an undervalued recruit into a finalist for the Wooden Award, given to the nation’s top player. He has helped Indiana (26-5) win its first outright Big Ten championship since 1993 — the clincher was a 72-71 victory at Michigan on Sunday — and get in position to nab a No. 1 seed in the N.C.A.A. tournament.

He fills a stat sheet with the zeal of a locavore at a farmers’ market — steals, rebounds, assists, points and blocks, all crammed onto the nightly résumé of perhaps the country’s most versatile, improved and exciting player. If Zeller made it cool again for in-state boys to play for the Hoosiers, then it is Oladipo who made Indiana basketball just plain cool.

“I don’t recall ever seeing a player here have the kind of energy, at both ends of the floor, that Victor shows on an every-game basis,” said Don Fischer, the radio voice of Indiana basketball for the last 40 years. “I don’t know if we’ll see anybody quite like him for a long time.”

Oladipo is at once efficient and electrifying, melding those treasured Hoosier State virtues of defense, hustle and offensive rebounding with a style as magnetic as his personality. He is averaging 13.7 points and 6.2 rebounds and, while often guarding the opposition’s best perimeter threat, leading the team in steals and deflections — the most critical indicator, for Coach Tom Crean and his staff, of a player’s defensive activity.

Oladipo’s defense, especially on the weak side, creates turnovers and, in turn, easy baskets that have sent his overall shooting percentage skyrocketing, to 61.4 percent from 47.1 last season. An uncompromising work ethic — he spends at least an extra 90 minutes every day practicing his shooting or ball-handling — has produced a refined jump shooter who, according to Hoop-math.com, has converted 50 percent of his 2-point jumpers, up from 24 percent.

The former Indiana player and coach Dan Dakich was chatting with some of his old teammates recently when the subject turned to Oladipo, and all agreed that they would loathe practicing against him.

“We all think we’re gladiators who survived Coach Knight and all that,” said Dakich, now an analyst for ESPN. “In our little world, that’s a pretty good compliment.”

Oladipo’s little world, until he arrived here in 2010, was his home in a rural pocket of Upper Marlboro, Md., about 20 miles east of Washington, where the family’s closest neighbors are horses and cows. His parents, immigrants from Nigeria who moved to the United States more than 25 years ago, relocated there before high school, attracted by a bigger home in a safer area but also because his father, Chris, enjoyed the seclusion. Oladipo characterized him as “isolated.”

When discussing his mother, Joan, and his three sisters — Kristine, Kendra and his twin, Victoria — Oladipo laughed and cracked jokes. He said that the five of them should star in a television comedy. “What would it be called?” Oladipo said. “The Oladipos, what else?” But when the conversation turned to his relationship with his father, Oladipo shifted in his chair, his voice dropping as he scanned the room.

“It’s kind of rare for me to be moody and stuff like that, but when I am, sometimes I see myself in him,” Oladipo said. “It’s just how he is. He’s always been like that. Growing up, you always want to hang with your dad — go fishing or whatever. But my dad was always working, so we never really had time for that. I think I kind of learned to accept it.”

Chris has never attended an Indiana game. He has told Joan that he watched his son play once or twice in high school, far from view in the back of the gym, but Oladipo is not sure. Before Joan intervened, Chris insisted that Oladipo spend the summer before his senior year of high school, a crucial one on the Amateur Athletic Union circuit, in China to study martial arts and self-discipline.

“I don’t know what he wanted, where he came up with that,” said Joan, a basketball and football fan who played netball in Nigeria. “But I wasn’t letting my son go halfway across the world for that.”

Encumbered by a disconnect with his father, and surrounded at home by women, Oladipo found male camaraderie in basketball. In a sense, his path was preordained. While pregnant with Oladipo and Victoria, Joan dreamed that Hakeem Olajuwon, a Hall of Fame player from Nigeria, signed a basketball and gave it to her. When Oladipo gravitated to the sport, Joan was hardly surprised.

“You’ve been playing since before you were born,” she told him.

And relishing attention for nearly as long. At his graduation from prekindergarten, the class sang a song. Oladipo had a solo.

“Of course he did,” Victoria said.

At school dances, crowds gathered around as he showed off his moves.

“He’s always loved to have all eyes on him,” Victoria said. “He feeds off the energy. It just makes him keep going and going.”

As Victoria remembers it, her brother’s first foray into organized basketball came in first or second grade, when a registration mix-up left him without a team until a spot was cleared. Oladipo led his squad to the championship and, from then on, Victoria said, laughing, “everyone wanted Victor on their team.”

Certainly Mike Jones did, when he recruited Oladipo to the national high school power DeMatha Catholic. Jones discovered him by accident in eighth grade; he came to scout Quinn Cook, who now plays for Duke, but was drawn to a 5-9 dynamo who dived for loose balls, battled for rebounds and encouraged his teammates.

“He’s a kid you want on your team because he’s cool enough to get everybody to want to be like him,” Jones said, “but he’s also the guy that’s going to be doing what you want him doing.”

For instance: as a junior, Oladipo was one of seven players who Jones said deserved to start. To avoid a potentially messy situation, he volunteered to come off the bench, telling Jones in front of the other six boys.

“I was like, ‘Thank you, are you serious?’ ” Jones said, “and the rest of the guys just looked at him like he was nuts.”

Oladipo occupied a distinct niche on his teams at DeMatha and in A.A.U. He dunked. And he defended.

“And that’s about it,” Oladipo said.

Kenny Johnson, an Indiana assistant who coached Oladipo on a Washington-area squad called Team Takeover, said he had to coax friends at George Mason and Virginia Commonwealth into scouting him. When Johnson drove Oladipo and an A.A.U. teammate to Maryland, his alma mater, for open gym, the Terrapins would not let him play.

“There were no delusions of grandeur at that point in his life that he was the guy,” Johnson said.

Oladipo’s modest scoring average at DeMatha — 12 points — obscured his potential. Even as he languished in rankings generated by prominent recruiting services, Crean viewed him as essential to an Indiana renaissance. What Crean saw — an explosive, ferocious defender with freakish athleticism who excelled on the fast break — was a raw facsimile of another 6-5 guard who thrived under his tutelage at Marquette: Dwyane Wade.

“I quit playing tricks in my mind a long time ago on what do I think I’m seeing,” Crean said. “Victor was not a mirage.”

The list of Indiana basketball greats is like a portal into the program’s hallowed past — Walt Bellamy, Quinn Buckner, Calbert Cheaney, George McGinnis, Scott May, Isiah Thomas — and when Oladipo first visited campus, he did not know many of them were Hoosiers. What he did know was that he cared greatly about the immediate past — he committed six months after Indiana went 6-25 in Crean’s first season, including 1-17 in conference play — and was unabashed in proclaiming his intent to lead Indiana back to glory.

A berth in the Round of 16 last year portended the Hoosiers’ resurgence, and with Oladipo’s future uncertain — he is scheduled to graduate in May, with a degree in sport communication-broadcast, and projects as a potential N.B.A. lottery pick — the N.C.A.A. tournament could mark Oladipo’s final games in cream and crimson.

A cheering section will follow him. Joan will repeat her mantra to him: “Stay hungry, stay focused, stay humble.” His sisters will yelp and scream their support. His father, he knows, will almost certainly stay home. Oladipo hopes they trail him for three weekends, all the way down to Atlanta, the site of the national championship game. And if Indiana cuts down the nets April 8, Oladipo knows just how he will celebrate. There is, he said, a song for that occasion, too.

A version of this article appears in print on March 11, 2013, on page D1 of the New York edition with the headline: Indiana Player Knows How to Wow a Crowd. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe